DS 



THE EAST: 




A PAPER READ BEFORE THE 



LITERARY SOCIETY 



OF WASHINGTON. D. C, 



On. Saturday Evening, March 20, 1880. 



BY 



M. F MORRIS, ESQ, 



WASHINGTON, D. C. 
1880. 



LIBRA RY OF CONG RESS. 



UNITED STATES OF AMEKIOA. 



THE EAST: 



A PAPER READ BEFORE THE 



LITERARY SOCIETY 



OF WASHINGTON, D. C, 



On Saturday Evening, March 20. 1880. 



;f! 



•w ' . BV 

M. F. MORRIS, ESQ. 



ii'iir'''i' v'^"'^"'im. iii. .. 




WASHINGTON, D. C. 
1880. 



To the Literary Society of Washington, D. 
this Paper is respectfully Dedicated. 



IN response to repeated requests, both from members of 
the Society and friends outside of it, the writer has re- 
luctantly consented to commit this Paper to print. As it 
was not intended for an elaborate essay, but merely as a 
contribution to the evening entertainment of the Society, 
he hopes that the kindness with which its first reading was 
received, will now be extended to it when it appears in a 
shape for severer criticism. Some explanatory notes are 
added, which, it is hoped, will enhance the value of the 
Paper. 



THE EAST. 



LET me ask you, ladies and gentlemen, to turn for 
a few brief moments from our busy Western 
World to the calm, contemplative, conservative East. 
The East ! It is the land of the sun and of romance, 
the source of all philosophy and of all religion, the 
cradle of our traditions and of our race ; and from its 
teeming hives the successive swarms of human popu- 
lation have gone forth over the earth. Land of the 
Crusader and the Saracen, of Abraham and Guatama, 
of Mohammed and Confucius, of the Magian and the 
Zoroastrian, — how many memories of our childhood, 
recalling the childhood of our race, cling round that 
primal home of our Aryan forefathers ! And now, 
when the course of empire, that has rolled westward 
full five thousand years, has found its Ultima Thule 
by the Golden Gates of our Californian Ophir, we 
seem at last to have fully realized the dream of Co- 
lumbus, and moving West to have found the East. 
The Aryan and the Mongolian, who separated fifty 
centuries ago under the shadow of the mighty peaks 
of the Himalayas, have met again on the broad 
bosom of the Pacific, and have renewed the contest for 
supremacy which severed them first on the high lands 
of Afghanistan.* The cycle of the ages begins anew. 

* See Note i. Appendix.' 

(5) 



O THE EAST. 

The mystery of the Asian question is throwing its 
darkening shadow over the politics of the world. 
While we are rudely summoned to meet one phase of 
it in California, our mother country is confronting 
another on the banks of the Indus and the Ganges. 
Even now, amid the mountain fastnesses of Cabul, 
the soldiers of Britain are occupying the native seats 
of their Aryan ancestors, and bearing back to its 
primeval altars the sacred fire first kindled in those 
regions when the sevenfold arch of omnipotence 
spanned the retreating waters of the last great mun- 
dane cataclysm.* Encircling the globe with their 
Briarean arms, two great Powers of Europe stand 
ready to encounter each other in deadly conflict on 
the central plains of Asia ; and at the same time the 
Mongolian race has awoken fi'om its long lethargy, 
and boldly questions the persistently asserted su- 
premacy of the Caucasian. 

The Red race of America is rapidly passing away 
before the encroachments of the European. We can 
easily foresee in the annals of coming time the doom 
of Africa. The inferior races are gradually clearing 
the world's great battle-field for the mighty contest 
that must inevitably come between the Caucasian and 
the Mongolian ; and while we may flatter ourselves 
that we can anticipate the result of that contest, too, 
it would be delusion to suppose that it does not in- 
volve elements of serious doubt. 

But little more than a quarter of a century has 
passed since a small naval force, flying the flag of our 

*See Note 2. 



THE EAST. 7 

young Republic, and bearing the broad pennant of 
Commodore Matthew C. Perry, sailed into the harbor 
of Yokohama, in Japan, and compelled that Island 
Empire of the East to enter the family of nations. 
What a wonderful transformation that Island Empire 
has exhibited to us in the intervening period ! Do 
the annals of time show another instance of develop- 
ment so extraordinary within so brief a span ! Who 
will presume to limit the capabilities of a nation of 
thirty millions of people, so keenly alive to the value 
of our western civilization ? 

And look at China, with its vast population of one 
quarter of the human race, industrious, patient, intel- 
ligent, inventive and imitative to a degree that aston- 
ishes our own inventive and imitative nation — ^edu- 
cated, in its own peculiar way, yet educated as no 
other nation on earth ever has been — possessed of 
resources most abundant — and who will say, that not- 
withstanding some unfortunate experiences in the 
past, China may not some day prove a dangerous 
adversary to the Caucasian nations ? 

The Mongolian races have more than once proved 
their ability to cope successfully with the Caucasian. 
Timur the Tartar captured and plundered Moscow, 
and found no such source of disaster there as did his 
Corsican imitator, when he dashed his soul in vain 
against its ramparts of fire and ruin. Before Timur, 
Mongolian armies, led by the sons of Genghis Khan, 
had invaded and desolated Russia, Poland and Hun- 
gary, and threatened Germany. Earlier still, that 
terrible Mongolian chief, Attila, the " Scourge of 
God," ranged with his victorious Huns from the 



8 THE EAST. 

Great Wall of China to the plains of Chalons and the 
rich fields of Lombardy. Separated far from the 
great body of the race, a people of Mongolian lineage 
settled as conquerors in the heart of Europe ; and a 
braver, more intelligent, or more talented nation there 
does not exist than the Magyars of Hungary. The 
Turks are largely of Mongolian origin ; and most of 
the tribes that have held sway in Southern Asia dur- 
ing the last three hundred years derive more or less 
of their blood from the same source. No abler gen- 
eral than Genghis Khan ever organized mankind for 
systematic slaughter ; and competent military critics 
have expressed the opinion that, since the " Sun of 
Austerlitz," there has been no more brilliant cam- 
paign than that of the Chinese general who, in 1878 
led his forces through the tremendous mountain de- 
files of Eastern Bokhara, and terminated one of the 
most arduous marches on record with the triumphant 
storming of Kashgar.* 

It is not safe for us to underrate the powers and 
capabilities of the Mongolian race. 

But it is not so much of Mongolian Asia that I 
would speak, as of a part of that great Eastern 
World tenanted by a branch of our own Aryan race 
— Hindustan — a country more unknown, perhaps, and 
more unappreciated than Mongolia; yet possessed of 
a language, a literature, a history, an intellectual de- 
velopment, and a power of action, scarcely second to 
any nation on earth. 

Three great events, great above all others, charac- 

* See Note 3. 



THE EAST. 9 

terized the eighteenth century; namely, our own 
Revolution, that of France, and the conquest of Hin- 
dustan by Lord Clive and Warren Hastings. Of the 
three, the last may not, perhaps, prove the least mo- 
mentous in its results. And certainly it was a most 
extraordinary event, when that magnificent Indian 
v/orld, which Alexander of Macedoii had sighed to 
conquer, and could not, became an appanage of an 
English trading company.* Of all the many prov- 
inces of that great Empire of Britain on which the 
sun never sets, she values none more dearly than she 
does Hindustan; and it has even been suggested 
that the gorgeous Oriental imagination of Benjamin 
D'Israeli has more than once brooded over a scheme 
to transfer the seat of English dominion from the 
banks of the Thames to the banks of the Ganges, 
and to renew in that morning land the power which 
in Europe has been threatened with dissolution. He 
would like to make the title of " Empress of Hindus- 
tan," which he has created for his royal mistress, 
something more than an empty phrase. 

How little we realize what elements of greatness 
there are in that vast peninsula of India, what a his- 
tory it has had, what grand traditions cluster around 
it, what mighty kingdoms and nations have existed 
there, what superbly intellectual races have erected 
their seats of empire within its borders, what works 
of art and of science have adorned its annals, what 
powerful influence its religious and political revolu- 
tions have exercised over the other nations of the 
world ! We have had some vague ideas of the power 

*See Note 4. 



lO THE EAST. 

and riches of the Great Mogul, and of the diamonds 
of Golconda, and of the grandeurs of Benares, and 
of the caverned wonders of Elephanta and Ellora. 
The poetry of our youth has painted in its most bril- 
hant dyes that Eden of Edens, the Valley of Cash- 
mere. Alas, that the serpent should have entered 
that Eden, too ! And we have read the story of the 
beautiful Nurmahal, the Light of the Harem, the 
conqueror of him who called himself, "the world's 
conqueror." And that same poetry has told us the 
episode of the fierce Mahmud of Gazni, laying waste 
the honored shrines of Hindu idolatry. We are more 
or less familiar with the fact, that contests long and 
bloody have been waged there between the votaries 
of Buddha and the worshipers of Brahma, and be- 
tween the children of Brahma and the followers of 
Mohammed. We have known that Timur bedewed 
the Indian plains with blood ; that his descendants 
erected there the Great Mogul (or Mongolian) Em- 
pire ; that the ruthless Persian Nadir Shah tore from 
the eyes of the idol of Vishnu the brilliant Kohinur, 
which now adorns the diadem of Victoria ; and that 
successive conquerors, from Semiramis to Ahmed 
Abdallah, have striven for the possession of its wealth. 
One of the most interesting chapters to be found in 
the history of modern discovery, is that which tells 
the story of Portuguese adventure in the East, and 
shows us Vasco de Gama, and the great Albuquerque, 
and the sainted Francis Xavier, planting the standard 
of Christianity and of European civilization on the 
shores of Bombay and Malabar. But all these are 
only a small part of the history of Hindustan.* 

*See Note 5. 



THE EAST. " I I 

That remarkable man Warren Hastings, the first 
EngHsh Governor- General of India, and whose trial 
on impeachment before the English House of Lords, 
for alleged crimes and misdemeanors in the con- 
duct of his high office, is one of the most noted trials 
on record — lasting as it did through nine years, and 
giving occasion in the speeches of his prosecutors, 
Burke and Sheridan, for some of the most splendid 
bursts of eloquence in the English language — ren- 
dered an imperishable service to the cause of literature 
and human knowledge by the establishment at Cal- 
cutta of the Asiatic Society, whose object was the in- 
vestigation of the history, literature, antiquities, man- 
ners and customs of Eastern Asia, and especially of 
Hindustan. With what magnificent success this object 
was pursued, students of Oriental literature can appre- 
ciate. The Asiatic Society has opened to us a new 
world of ideas ; and in the writings of Sir William 
Jones, its most illustrious member, and probably the 
most accomplished scholar of all the world; in the 
works of Todd, Wilford, Wilson, Colebrook and 
others ; and in the numerous publications and trans- 
lations that have emanated from the Asiatic Society, 
the scholars of Europe, wearied with the repetition of 
Greek forms and classical ideas, have been equally 
startled and pleased to discover a literature more 
luxuriant than any in Europe.* 

It is now known that the Sanscrit language, the 
ancient language of Hindustan, now unspoken and 
sacred, was the oldest sister — for a time it was even 
deemed the parent — of the great European tongues, 

* See Note 6. 



,12 THE EAST. 

Greek, Latin, Sclavonic, Celtic and Teutonic; that it 
is rich in poetry and philosophy ; and that it tends to 
explain many things that have hitherto been obscure 
in the history of our race. From this knowledg'" the 
science of the Comparative Analysis of Language has 
arisen, and the brotherhood of the Aryan nations 
has been manifested. Many legends and myths have 
been resolved into history. History has been freed 
from many of its obscurities. The tradition has been 
vindicated which deduced the human race from 
some mountain region, some inadequately recog- 
nized Ararat, of Central Asia. The evidence has 
been found that all the great branches of the race, 
extending from the Bay of Bengal to the Western 
Isles of the Atlantic, originally radiated from the 
table lands of Pamir on the northwestern frontier 
of India, and carried thence, through all their wan- 
derings and through all their migrations, distinctive 
traces of the language, religion, and manners of the 
parent family. 

On the plains of Hindustan, ruins of cities have 
been found that were old before Romulus and Remus 
were suckled, of kingdoms and empires that were 
mighty when Moses crossed the Red Sea. There 
have been discovered there, too — old, but not in 
ruins — the remains of a literature that flourished 
before Homer sung; of a philosophy that sounded 
all the heights and depths of immortal thought, and 
sought in vain to fathom the mystery of existence, 
long before Plato taught his divine subtleties in the 
groves of Academus, or Pythagoras applied logic to 
politics in his socialistic republic at Crotona. As old 



THE EAST. 13 

at least as the Pentateuch of Moses — older, perhaps — 
are the Vedas of the Hindus, the four sacred books 
which contain the doctrines, the prayers, and the 
liturgical formulas, that constituted the expression 
of the religious life of the oldest branch of the Aryan 
race, and which are certainly superior, as a religious 
system, to aught else on record than the sublime 
precepts of the Hebrew Scriptures. 

Eighteen books of commentaries, known as the 
Puranas — also of very great antiquity — supplement 
the Vedas with an exposition of the Brahminical the- 
ology and philosophy. To the Vedas they are what 
the Talmud is to the Koran of Mohammed.* 

More than three hundred years before *' the blind 
old man of Scio's rocky isle" sung "the tale of Troy 
divine" to his Hellenic countrymen on the JEgcan 
shores, Valmika wrote in Sanscrit the epic story of 
the Ramayuna, commemorative of the contest of 
Rama, the hero of the so-called Solar Race of Hin- 
dustan, with the gigantic Ravan of Lanca, in which 
all the powers of nature, heaven, earth, and hell, par- 
ticipated. The Ramayuna is a poem as long as 
Homer's Iliad — and as grand, if we can only look 
at it, not from the point of Grecian taste, but with the 
fervid eyes of a tropical imagination. As in the story 
of the lUiad, the contest celebrated in the Rama- 
yuna was occasioned by the unlawful abduction of a 
woman of marvelous beauty, "a daughter of the 
gods, divinely tall and most divinely fair." But it is 
greatly to the credit of the morality of Hindustan 
and the moral grandeur of the poem, that Sita, the 

^See Note 7. 



14 THE EAST. 

wife of Rama and heroine of the Ramayuna, was not 
a wanton Hke the Homeric Helen, but a faithful wife 
and pure-minded woman, who resisted alike the 
threats and blandishments of her abductor, and re- 
turned such to her husband, when the rock-ribbed 
ramparts of Lanca had fallen before his terrible 
enginery. Lanca, the Hindu Troy, was on the 
Island of Ceylon ; and the natural scenery around 
that island and the neighboring continent gave the 
Hindu poet opportunities for description not less 
magnificent than those of Homer. 

It is, perhaps, Worth while to mention that the 
earliest recorded statement of the ordeal by fire, 
familiar enough to us in the history of the Middle 
and Dark Ages of Europe, is to be found in the 
Ramayuna. The ordeal was undergone by Sita, after 
her deliverance and return to her husband, to prove 
her innocence of any complicity with the tyrant 
Ravan in the affair of her abduction. 

Later than Valmika, yet still apparently much an- 
terior to Homer, another great Epic Poet of Hindus- 
tan, Vyasa, a worthy disciple and successor of Val- 
mika, wrote the Mahabharata, or Story of the Great 
War. The war referred to was the contest, memor- 
able in Hindu history, between the Pandu and the 
Kuru princes, rival and nearly related families of the 
so called Lunar Race, for the possession of the im- 
perial crown of Hindustan, which seems to have 
occurred about thirteen centuries before the Christian 
Era, and consequently some time before the Trojan 
War. It was the epoch of the appearance of the hero 
Chrishna, the eighth avatar or incarnation of Vishnu, 



THE EAST. i^ 

who, in his human form, mingled actively in the war 
as the champion of the Pandus, and whose exploits 
more than rival those of Achilles before Troy. The 
war is stated to have culminated in a tremendous 
battle of eighteen days' duration on the plains of 
Agra, and to have resulted in the almost total ex- 
termination of one party, and ultimately in the vol- 
untary withdrawal of the other from the country. 

The poem of the Mahabharata is nearly as long as 
Milton's "Paradise Lost." Like the Ramayuna, it is 
not, in all respects, consistent with our canons of lit- 
erary taste. Yet it is a wonderful poem, in which the 
manners and customs of the time are as vividly delin- 
eated as are those of the heroic ages of Greece in 
the pages of Homer ; and beautiful episodes of deeds 
of love and war alternate with profound speculations 
on the problems of philosophy and religion. 

To make the parallel with Homer and Milton com- 
plete, there is a tradition, apparently as unsupported 
by testimony as in the case of the Greek poet, that 
Vyasa became blind in his old age. 

The remarkable similarity between the Homeric 
legends and the poems of the Ramayuna and Mah- 
abharata, together with some other curious coinci- 
dences between early Greece and Hindustan, has 
given occasion for a theory that the heroes of the 
Trojan War, and Troy itself, were but figments of 
Homer's brain ; and that his poems were but the 
echoes of events of earlier date and far distant regions, 
the memories of which had been brought westward 
by the self-exiled heroes of the Great War. But this 
theory, like many others, not utterly devoid of foun- 



1 6 THE EAST. 

dation, has been very substantially refuted by the 
discoveries of Schliemann on the hill of Hissirlik, and 
the unveiling to the light of day of the long-buried 
city of Hector and Priam. The similarity is, in all 
probability, mainly due to the sameness of human 
thought in all ages and all nations.* 

The drama is not unknown in Hindustan. But a 
few months ago, a paragraph may have been noticed 
in some one of the newspapers, to the effect that the 
play of Sacontala, or The Fatal Ring, had been 
brought out and successfully represented before an 
admiring audience of Hindus and European scholars, 
in a new Hindu theatre just opened at Calcutta. The 
play is older than the Christian Era, and its story is 
one of the numerous legends connected with Rama 
and Sita, the hero and heroine of the Ramayuna, and, 
after Chrishna, the most favorite themes of Hindu 
song and romance. It is probably the masterpiece of 
Hindu dramatic literature. Indeed, it approaches 
more nearly in form and manner, as well as in style, 
to our modern standard, than do the productions of 
the Greek dramatists. Calidasa, the author of the 
Sacontala, and of several other similar works, was 
the Shakspere of Hindustan ; or, perhaps, we might 
more appropriately say, its Calderon : he reminds us 
more of the great Spanish dramatist than of any 
other of our western writers. He was the contempo- 
rary of Cicero and Virgil, and of the Augustan age 
of Rome ; and his epoch was also an Augustan age 
for Hindustan. Vicramaditya, the monarch who 
then occupied the imperial throne, was as munificent 

* See Note 8. 



THE EAST. 17 

a patron of literature and of literary men as his 
western contemporary, Augustus Caesar, and no less 
famous in the civil and military administration of the 
affairs of his country, from which he expelled the 
numerous invaders by whom it had been harassed.* 
The Ramayuna, the Mahabharata, and the Sacon- 
tala, are the most prominent works of their kind, but 
by no means the only ones, in the literature of Hin- 
dustan. Other epics there are less noted, other 
dramas less popular, besides lyric poems innumer- 
able, hymns to the gods, didactic pieces, philo- 
sophical disquisitions, and even mathematical treatises 
in verse. The Muse of Hindustan can scarcely be 
said to be less prolific than her sister of Greece. In 
the poetry of no other land are the images of external 
nature so frequently reproduced. Attention has been 
called of late to the fact, that the ancient Greeks and 
Romans, as far as we can judge from their writings 
that have survived to us, had very little appreciation 
of natural beauty and the charms of scenery; and that 
the descriptions of nature, which constitute so large 
and so important a feature in modern poetry, are 
almost entirely of modern growth. But the poetry of 
the Hindus is full of them, — full to an extent which 
we would be disposed to consider superabundant. 
And it is only natural to expect abundant inspiration 
from external nature in a land of soil and climate so 
varied, ranging from those culminating peaks of all 
the world, the snow-clad Himalayas, to the eternal 
summers of Ceylon; in a land of wealth and resources 
unsurpassed, where the Ganges flows through an 

*See Note 9. 2 



i8 



THE EAST. 



alluvial soil almost as rich as the Valley of the Mis- 
sissippi ; where the effort of man often is to contend 
with a vegetation too luxuriant; where the tiger in 
his jungle and the lion in his lair contend with man 
for the dominion of the land. 

I would notice here one other remarkable Hindu 
poem — the Gitagovinda of Jayadeva, a lyric compo- 
sition of extraordinary character. The Gitagovinda, 
or Loves of Chrishna and Rhadha, has for its subject, 
as its second title implies, the amours of the hero of 
the Mahabharata with the fair young shepherd prin- 
cess whom he made his bride. It is a mystical poem 
in the style of the Song of Solomon, or Canticle of 
Canticles, in which the intercourse of the soul with 
the divinity is set forth in terms and figures more 
sensuous and more highly wrought than in that 
singular production of the famous monarch of Israel. 
It is especially noticeable for its luxuriant appreciation 
of the beauty of external nature, its constantly re- 
curring references to the brilliant flora of Agra and 
Bengal, and most of all for the remarkably respectful 
deportment of the hero towards the heroine, akin to 
worship, which is the general characteristic of Hindu 
literature, and which manifests a reverence for woman 
that is to be found in no other nation outside of the 
pale of Christianity, and not in all nations within it. 
Jayadeva, the author of the Gitagovidna, is styled by 
Sir William Jones, the Pindar and "the sublime lyric 
poet of Hindustan." 

We sometimes flatter ourselves, that we have ex- 
plored all the realms of thought and investigated all 



THE EAST. 19 

the domain of philosophy, and that, outside of Europe 
and America, there is no philosophy worthy of the 
name. But we have been anticipated in all our spec- 
ulations by the Hindus. There is nothing new in the 
pantheism of Spinoza, or in the idealism of Berkeley 
and Malebranche, or in the transcendentalism of 
Kant and Fichte, or in the evolutionism of Darwin 
and Huxley and Tyndal. They were all discussed 
three thousand years ago by brilliant intellects at 
Agra and Benares. 

The Vedas contain the first germs of the Panthe- 
istic philosophy. Kapila elaborated it into a system 
long before Greece emerged from its native barbarism. 
From him Pythagoras borrowed it ; and he, in turn, 
transmitted it to the Gnostics of the first centuries of 
the Christian Era, and they to Averroes and Spinoza. 

The basis of Buddhism, as enunciated by its 
founder Guatama or Gotama, is pure and simple 
idealism — the theory of the non-existence of matter, 
and that soul or spirit is the only actual existence. 
Bishop Berkeley, who sustained this theory in the last 
century with a course of reasoning most difficult to be 
answered, is far behind Guatama. 

Aristotle was anticipated in his system of logic by 
an intellect as acute and brilliant as his own, the 
Hindu Kanada, who was also the author of the atomic 
philosophy. Democritus, of Abdera, who, like his 
countryman, Pythagoras, traveled in the East, and 
very probably visited India, became acquainted there 
with the theories of the Hindu philosopher, and from 
thence introduced the atomic philosophy into Greece, 
with its logical consequence, the doctrine of evolution. 



20 THE EAST. 

From him Epicurus took up the theory, and Lucre- 
tius enshrined it in stately verse, long before it 
was resuscitated by D'Holbach, and illustrated by 
Darwin.''' 

. To the educated Hindu there is nothing new in our 
philosophy, nor is there much that is new to him in our 
religion or in our irreligion. He is equally familiar with 
the great principles that underlie the one, and the want 
of principle that characterizes the other. A triad or 
trinity of Godhead is as prominent a feature of his creed 
as it is of the Christian. Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva — 
the Creator, the Preserver, and the Destroyer — are, in 
his mythology, threefold emanations of the one, eter- 
nal, uncreated, incomprehensible First Principle ; and 
their functions in the system of the Hindu religion, 
though differing very much from those of the three 
Sacred Persons of the Christian Trinity, plainly evince 
that the idea of a Triune God is one of the primeval 
traditions of our race. And as to manifestations of 
the divinity in human form — another primeval tradi- 
tion which finds its earliest expression in the promise 
contained in the third chapter of the book of Genesis 
of a Redeemer to come — the Hindus are not satisfied 
with one incarnation. They record twenty-four in- 
carnations, or, as they call them, avatars of Vishnu, 
the second person of the Hindu Triad ; of which ten 
are regarded as of paramount importance, and are de- 
nominated the great avatars. The three first of these 
are conjectured to have reference to the phenomena 
of the Noachian Deluge, the fourth to the story of 
Nimrod, and the fifth to that of the Babylonian Belus. 



* vSee Note lo. 



THE EAST. 21 

The sixth commemorates some notable, though now 
unknown, event in the early history of Hindustan. In 
the seventh, Vishnu became incarnate in Rama, the 
hero of the Ramayuna ; in the eighth, in Chrishna, the 
hero of the Mahabharata. Buddha was the ninth and 
last; for the tenth is yet to come. And it seems 
strange enough that the author of the Buddhistic Re- 
formation should be regarded by the Brahmins as an 
incarnation of Vishnu, while the followers of Buddha 
have been driven from Hindustan, and compelled to 
take refuge in regions beyond its limits, where, how- 
ever, their doctrines have succeeded in drav\ ing to 
their profession the greater part of the Mongolian 
race, and of the people of the Malaysian Islands. The 
tenth avatar, it has been stated, is yet to come. It 
symbolizes the advent of Vishnu riding on a white 
steed, and armed with a blazing scimitar, to destroy 
the world — a figure strongly suggestive of the similar 
one in the Apocalypse of St. John.* 

The theory of successive incarnations of the God- 
head, so prominent a feature in the mythology of 
Hindustan, was occasionally borrowed from the 
Brahmins by religious and revolutionary propa- 
gandists of other nations. Traces of it are found 
in Gnosticism, which gave so much trouble to the 
Christian Church of the first ages; and various sects 
among the Mohammedans have adopted it, especially 
among the the votaries of Ali. Readers of Lalla 
Rookh will remember that the "Veiled Prophet of 
Khorasan" claimed to be such an incarnation, and 
induced his deluded followers such to believe him : 

^"See Note ii. 



22 THE EAST. 

and it is a fact that the Mokanna of history — for 
the "Veiled Prophet" was a historical personage — 
actually propagated that doctrine, which undoubtedly 
he received from the Hindus. In his speech to 
young Azirn, he is represented as saying: 

" Beinofs the most divine 



Thus deign through dark mortality to shine. 

Such was the essence that in Adam dwelt, 

To which all heaven, except the proud one, knelt: 

Such the refined intelligence that glowed 

In Moussa's frame — and thence descending, flowed 

Through many a prophet's breast — in Issa shone, 

And in Mohammed burned ; till, hastening on, 

(As a bright river, that, from fall to fall, 

In many a maze descending, bright through all, 

Finds some fair region, where, each labyrinth passed. 

In one full lake of light it rests at last,) 

That Holy Spirit, settling calm and free 

From lapse or shadow, centres all in me." 

One of the most remarkable doctrines of the Hindu 
theology — one which, however, it shares with the 
religion of ancient Egypt, to which it was probably 
communicated from the East — is that of metempsy- 
chosis, or the transmigration of souls. This is one 
of the numerous theories which Pythagoras brought 
back with him from his Oriental travels, and intro- 
duced into Greece and Italy; though the idea seems 
never to have taken root among the western nations, 
and perished with the immediate school of that phil- 
osopher. The doctrine of the transmigration of the 
human soul through different bodies, is the comple- 
ment of the doctrine of successive incarnations of the 
divinity, and is not entirely unwarranted by traditions 
of a similar character. And there are physical and 



THE EAST. 23 

psychological theories entertained by not a few in 
our own age and country, which give countenance to 
this wildest speculation of the Hindu brain. 

To Hindustan we are indebted, not only for many 
of our ideas in philosophy, but also for many things 
that enter into our daily life, and the origin of which 
is generally very little suspected. 

The sip-ns of the Zodiac, and the curious and 
hitherto unaccountable astronomical names and de- 
vices, with which, for our convenience, we have 
mapped out the starry firmament of night, together 
with very much of the substance of our astronomy, 
are distinctly of Hindu origin, and came to us from 
the banks of the Ganges. Our common Arabic 
numerals, so called, are Hindu, and not Arabic at all; 
and were used by the Brahmins long before the rise 
of the Arabs or the birth of Mohammed. They were 
not known to the Arabs themselves until after their 
first invasion of Hindustan in the eighth century 
of our Era; and we call them Arabic, because they 
were introduced into Europe about three centuries 
afterwards, by or through the Arabs of Spain. Only 
those who have had occasion to use the Roman or 
Greek numerals, can fully appreciate the vast im- 
portance of the Hindu figures to our science and our 
daily life, and what a debt of gratitude we owe to the 
inventors of them. If Hindustan had done naught 
else but invent our numerals, it would deserve to 
stand in the very front rank of human civilization. 

The game of chess is of Hindu origin: it is referred 
to in the Mahabharata. Playing cards were not first 



24 THE EAST. 

invented to amuse the insane Charles VI. of France, 
as is commonly stated. It is now tolerably clear that 
they were known in P^urope some time before the 
reign of that unfortunate monarch; and that, indeed, 
they were introduced from the East during the Cru- 
sades, or shortly after their termination. Like the 
numerals, they came to the West directly through 
the Saracens or Arabs ; but like the numerals, the 
Arabs themselves procured them from the Hindus, 
in v/hose books mention is frequently made of them 
before the Saracens became known to history. 

To the same source we can now trace many of our 
myths and legends, and much of what is called the 
folk-lore of Europe. Even our nursery tales, from 
Cinderella and Little Red Riding-Hood to William 
Tell, find their counterparts in the Sanscrit language, 
and in the Hindustani, its more modern successor; 
and we may justly suppose that they find there their 
originals, also — since that language supplies the ex- 
planation of many of them. For it seems that, after 
all, many of these stories of our childhood are not the 
meaningless narratives they appear to be. but are, in 
fact, expressions of familiar natural phenomena — 
highly figurative illustrations of the phases of the sun 
and moon, of the dawn, the morning star, the winds, 
and of the spirits that were supposed to reside in the 
air and in the celestial bodies. With such fanciful 
impersonations of natural phenomena our primeval 
fathers beguiled the evening leisure of their first off- 
spring on the highlands of ancient Arya ; and the 
stories which they told, and which with them were 
readily recognized S};mbolisms of daily occurrences, 



THE EAST. 25 

became with their descendants mere traditions, recitals 
whose true meanings were gradually lost-— -recitals 
without a moral, or with a very different one from 
that which gave them birth. 

Our very superstitions are many of them of Hindu 
origin. What is there to which superstition clings 
more desperately than to the horse-shoe as an emblem 
of good-luck ? Our ancestors hung it over their 
doors: some of their descendants persist in hanging 
it there yet. Lord Nelson sailed into the battle ot 
the Nile with one nailed to the mast-head of his 
vessel. Latterly, the use of the horse-shoe seems to 
have received a new lease of vitality. Beauty sets it 
with diamonds, and wears it on her wrist, or suspends 
it around her neck. So do her sisters of Hindustan : 
so have they done for unnumbered ages. But who 
can tell what it means, or why it should mean any- 
thing? As a horse-shoe, it does not mean anything. 
But the emblem was not a horse-shoe originally, but 
either a representation of the crescent moon, or an 
adaptation of a symbol of nature-worship quite familiar 
to the devotees of Siva in Hindustan. The one ex- 
planation is suggested by the worshipers of Siva, the 
other by those of Vishnu. Either will account for it 
with a reasonable degree of satisfaction ; while no one 
ever has been able to explain why the horse-shoe, as 
such, should be regarded as an omen or symbol of 
good luck. 

It may be that some of us have been witnesses of 
a custom that prevailed some years ago, and possibly 
yet prevails, in some parts of Ireland and of the 
Highlands of Scotland, of kindling fires from hill to 



26 THE EAST. 

hill throughout the country on the night preceding 
Midsummer Day, or St. John's Day, the 24th of 
June. To this custom reference is made more than 
once by Sir Walter Scott. The people who kindle 
thesQ fires know not for what reason they do so ; 
though it is sometimes said to be in honor of St. 
John. But why St. John should be so honored, does 
not appear. Of course, it is almost unnecessary to 
say that the custom has nothing to do with St. John. 
We now know that those fires were first lit on the 
summits of the Hindu Kush Mountains in honor of 
the God of Day, by the worshipers of Agni, the first 
demoralizers of the purer Vedic religion of the early 
Aryans ; and that the custom itself is a superstitious 
remnant of the old Asiatic worship of Sun and Fire. 

I have no doubt that a great many of our supersti- 
tious customs and usages can be traced to a similar 
remote source. 

The Hindus are intimately skilled in the use of 
drugs and herbs and potions, oftentimes of wonderful 
power; but of their medical science we know as yet 
comparatively little. If the occasional indications 
that are given to us of their knowledge of the mys- 
terious secrets of nature — such, for example, as their 
power of suspending animation for a considerable 
period of time — are to be taken as a criterion of their 
acquaintance with the therapeutic art, there may be 
much for us to learn from them in the domain of 
medicine. In the domain of jurisprudence, the 
Hindus point with pride to the Laws of Menu, earlier 
in all probability than the laws of Solon or Lycurgus, 
or the Roman Laws of the Twelve Tables : and the 



THE EAST. 27 

code, known as the Gentu Code, founded upon the 
Laws of Menu, and which is in a great measure the 
civil law of Hindustan to-day, was of so enlightened 
a character as to elicit the admiration of a lawyer as 
eminent as Sir William Jones. 

But it is impossible, within the scope of a paper 
hke the present, to give a satisfactory idea either of 
the jurisprudence or of the medical science of Hin- 
dustan ; and much that has been here said in refer- 
ence to the intellectual development of its people in 
other respects, is necessarily very crude and super- 
ficial. ' 

History shows us no example of a nation, once 
fallen, that has ever again risen to glory and power. 
The Assyrian fell, and the city of his pride vanished 
utterly from the face of the earth. Great Babylon 
fell, and the sands of the desert have entombed its 
very ruins. When the last of the Pharaohs was 
borne to rest amid the granite hills of the Thebaid, 
the glory of his people was folded in his winding 
sheet. No second instalment of imperial power has 
been granted to Athens or Rome. Alien races, it is 
true, have sometimes re-erected the fallen fabric of 
empire in its former seats. So the Macedonian Ptole- 
mies restored the kingdom of Egypt; and the Arabs, 
when they became lords of Asia, built at Bagdad a 
capital for their dominions of which Nebuchadnezzar 
in his marble tomb, deep beneath the ruins of neigh- 
boring Babylon, might have been proud. But only 
alien races have so rebuilt the ruined structure of 
empire. The people who first dwelt in it, dwell there 



28 THE EAST. 

no more for ever. The life of nations is like the life 
of individuals; it knows no second prime. 

But as the course of empire has now found its ut- 
most western limit, it must be renewed, if renewed at 
all, in the East. Even if there is no resurrection from 
the dead for fallen nations, and the chldren of Brahma, 
therefore, may never hope to recover the sovereignt}^ 
that was theirs three thousand years ago, it would not 
be unreasonable, to expect that, mingled with the 
blood of Britain, guided by the strong arm, and steady 
resolve, and earnest purpose of that most energetic 
representative of the Aryan races, and armed with 
appliances unknown to the old civilization, the most 
ancient of those races should again enter on " the 
world's broad field of battle." 

A people of more acute intellect and higher sense 
of honor, a people of finer forms and more beautifully 
moulded features, a people more fitted for resolute en- 
durance and heroic effort, there does not exist, than 
the Hindus; and it would be difficult to determine 
the limit of their capabilities under favorable auspices. 
I refer, of course, merely to the Hindus proper, and 
not to the twenty millions and upwards of the descend- 
ants of heterogenerous invaders and foreign settlers, 
mostly professing Mohammedanism, who have estab- 
lished themselves in the country. Let but some new 
Rama rise — some adventurous and daring English- 
man, perhaps, with the spirit of Clive and the ambition 
of Napoleon — and the genius of Hindustan may tower 
once more among the nations. Only three years ago, 
the transfer of a few Hindu regiments in the English 
service from Hindustan to Malta, to meet the possible 



THE EAST. 29 

emergencies of the Russo-Turkish war, then in pro- 
gress, aroused the susceptibiHties of England and of 
Europe, and set the minds of men to thinking of the 
possibiHties of that great Oriental dependency of the 
British crown. (When the *' Man of Destiny" arises 
for Hindustan — as it seems to us arise he must — a new 
light may dawn from the Orient to usher in a new 
cycle of time. 



APPENDIX. 



NOTES. 



Note I. The earliest traditions, both of Persia and of 
Hindustan, show ^us the Iranian and Turanian, the Aryan 
and the Mongohan races in deadly conflicts: and the 
Aryans were not always the conquerors. See FirdousVs 
Shah Nameh, or Book of Kings, and Mirkhond' s History 
of Persia. 

Note 2. Arya, Aria, or Ariana, the ancient name of 
the country now designated as Bokhara and Afghanistan, 
including the great table-land of the Parapomisus or 
Hindu Kush Mountains, and the regions extending to the 
north and south of that range, is now generally regarded 
as the parent home of all the Aryan — or, as they were 
formerly with less propriety called, the Caucasian — nations. 
And in the same region, and probably in the elevated land 
of Pamir, north of the valley of Cashmere, we are to look 
for the cradle of the whole human race. The Ararat of 
the Mosaic writings, which is generally identified with the 
great mountain peak of Armenia would seem to have 
really been intended to designate the whole range of the 
Parapomisus, the back-bone of Asia and of the globe : and 
the tradition recorded in the Book of Genesis is not, there- 
fore, antagonistic to the result of modern researches. 

The word or syllable Ar, which is the basis of the words 
Aria, Aryans, Armenia, Ararat, Aram, Arphaxad, Arba- 
ces, Artaphernes , and so many other well-known eastern 

(30) 



APPENDIX. 31 

names, has evidently a significance importing that some 
primitive idea is embodied in it; and yet philologists have 
thus far been unable to ascertain its meaning with any 
degree of certainty. Some consider it to mean man (Irish 
far); others regard it as equivalent \o great (Celtic, ard — 
high") ; while there is reason to suppose that the Latin word 
^r^_to plough, to cultivate the soil — is derived from the 
same root, and consequently that Ar has some reference to 
the earth. 

Note 3. Whenever the Mongolians have exerted their 
power, they have always proved formidable. As already 
intimated in the first Note, Attila and Genghis Khan and 
Timur were not their first or only great conquerors. The 
Zendavesta of Zoroaster, the sacred book of the ancient 
Persians and of their descendants, the modern Parsis of 
Hindustan, refers to tremendous struggles in the very 
earliest days between Turan and Iran; and Firdusi, the epic 
poet of Persia, and Mirkhond and Khondemir, its histor- 
ians, relate in their books the repeated conquests of the 
Iranian Empire of Persia by the two Afrasiabs, father and 
son, or grandfather and grandson, monarchs of Turan, 
Turkestan or Mongolia, before the accession of Cyrus the 
Great to the Persian throne. 

It is a mistake to suppose that Genghis Khan and Timur 
were mere barbarians, who bore down their more civilized 
neighbors with simple force of numbers. Genghis Khan, 
at least, was an accomplished general, a wise sovereign, 
and a prudent legislator; and he stands forth in the Asiatic 
system with the same prominence as Charlemagne in that 
of mediaeval Europe. The empire erected by him and his 
sons was the largest that ever existed, not even excepting 
the empires of Russia and Great Britain ; it included nearly 
the whole of Asia, and a large part of Europe. The cele- 



32 THE EAST. 

brated Venetian traveler, Marco Polo, visited Cambalu, the 
capitol of the Mongolian Empire, during the reign of Octai 
Khan, the son and immediate successor of Genghis ; and 
the accounts which he gives of the wealth and power of the 
empire, though for a long time deemed gross exaggerations, 
have now been found correct almost to the minutest detail. 
Marco Polo was present at the siege and capture of Pekin 
by Octai, in A. D. 1230; and his description of the event 
is the first in which distinct mention is made of gunpowder 
and cannon as implements of war. As far as we know at 
present, the Mongolian race was the inventor of that most 
potent engine of destruction and civilization ever invented. 

Timur (or Tamerlane) was a more ferocious warrior than 
Genghis Khan, and by far the most rapid and energetic on 
record. Napoleon Bonaparte's marches were slow, com- 
pared to those of the Tartar conqueror. From Moscow to 
Delhi, from Samarcand to the borders of Egypt, from Ana- 
tolia to the Great Wall of China, he moved with a rapidity 
never known before or since in the annals of war. Europe 
and civihzation owe him a debt of gratitude, notwithstand- 
ing his many cruelties, for his defeat of the Turkish Sultan, 
Bayazid, at the tremendous battle of Angora, in 1402— a 
battle which saved Constantinople from the Turks for half 
a century. 

Attila, or Etzel, known as "The Scourge of Godj" was 
by far the most formidable of all the barbarian leaders who 
contributed to the overthrow of the Roman Empire of the 
West ; and yet he was more easily swayed by sentimental 
considerations than most of the others. Pope St. Leo was 
successful in his effort to divert him from his threatened 
march on Rome. One of the most dramatic scenes in his- 
tory is the meeting of the aged chief of the Western church 
with the fiery leader of the Huns in the tent of the latter, 
before the walls of Aquileia. 



APPENDIX. 33 

It is a remarkable fact that, in the great battles of the 
world in which the Monoglians have taken part, more men 
have been engaged than in any other of the numerous con- 
flicts between the nations. In the battle on the plains of 
Durocatalaunum or Chalons in France, in the year 451, 
between Attila and the combined forces of the Romans 
and Visigoths, commanded by Aetius and Theodoric, the 
opposing armies are estimated to have numbered a million 
and a half of men, almost equally divided between the two 
sides. It is stated that, at the battle of the Jaxartes, in A. D. 
1220, Genghis Khan commanded 700,000 men, against 
500,000 led by Mohammed of Karasm. The battle of An- 
gora, between Timur and Sultan Bayazid, in A. D. 1402, 
lasted three days; 800,000 men were engaged in it under 
Timur, while the Turkish Sultan is said to have commanded 
400,000. 

No doubt these numbers are very much exaggerated. We 
know how very difficult it is, even in our own day, to pro- 
cure exact estimates of the forces engaged in the different 
battles with which we are familiar. It is the interest of 
commanders of armies to magnify their numbers before 
battle, and afterwards very often to underestimate them, 
especially in the event of defeat. Yet, making all due 
allowance for exaggeration, it must be admitted that, when- 
ever the Mongolian races have exerted themselves to display 
their military power, they have been able to bring into the 
field a greater number of troops than any of the Aryan 
nations. 

Reference is made to the recent campaign of the Chinese, 
under Liu-Sho, against the Mohammedan kingdom at- 
tempted to be set up at Kashgar by Yakub Khan, in defiance 
of the sovereignty of the Chinese Empire. This campaign 
has equally surprised and astonished Europe with the dis- 
play of power and strategy evidenced by it. 

3 



34 THE EAST. 

Note 4. Until the year 1857, the Hindu possessions of 
England were not directly the property of the Enghsh gov- 
ernment, but were actually controlled and owned by the 
famous East India Company. This noted corporation was 
chartered in A. D. 1599, by Queen Elizabeth. In A. D. 
t6t2, it obtained permission from the great Mogul Emperor 
Selim Jehanghir, the famous lover of Nurmahal, to establish 
a factory or trading post at Surat, on the western coast of 
India. In A. D. 1676, a similar concession was obtained 
from the Emperor Aurungzib to establish a factory on the 
river Hoogly, one of the branches of the Ganges, which, was 
the foundation of Calcutta. The company was contented 
with commercial privileges until A. D. 1748, when, in the 
confusion that attended the breaking up of the great Mogul 
Empire, it began to make territorial acquisitions. In its 
service Robert CUve, one of the greatest and most erratic of 
English generals, commenced his remarkable career at 
the early age of twenty-three, in the year 1748; and he 
soon conquered for it Madras, Tanjore, and Bengal, and 
established the English dominion on a firm basis. He 
returned to England in 1767, and died by his own hand in 
1774, at the age of forty-nine, 

Warren Hastings was appointed the first Governor Gen- 
eral of all the provinces of British India in 1773, and ruled 
until 1786, contemporaneously with the period of our Rev- 
olutionary War. He extended and consolidated the British 
sway. His successor was Lord Cornwallis, whose previous 
surrender at Yorktown had not served to diminish the 
esteem in which he was held at home. His administration, 
both civil and military, of the affairs of Hindustan, was 
much more successful than his career in America. 

Among other distinguished Enghshmen who attained 
eminence in India was Sir Philip Francis, now generally 
recognized as the author of the famous "■ Letters of Junius," 



APPENDIX. 35 

and the bitter and unrelenting enemy of Hastings. He was 
a member of the Council of Bengal, under the latter, from 
1774 to 1780. 

Sir William Jones, the able lawyer, the honored judge, the 
profound scholar, the refined and amiable gentleman, the 
friend of America as well as of Hindustan, and one of the 
most accomplished men that ever existed, was a judge of 
the supreme court of judicature of Bengal from 1783 to his 
death in 1794. To him more than any other one man, we 
are indebted for our knowledge of Hindustan and its 
literature. 

All these men received their commissions directly from 
the East India Company, and not from the Government; 
though, in 1783, the Government deemed it necessary to 
reorganize the Company, and thereafter exercised a control- 
ling influence in the management of its affairs. The control 
became gradually more and more direct ; and finally, in 
1857, in consequence of the Sepoy War, the pohtical power 
of the famous corporation was abolished, and Hindustan 
became directly subject to the crown. The Company 
lasted until 1873, when its charter expired. 

Note S- Only fragmentary notices of Hindu history 
come to us through the ancient classical writers. The 
invasions of the country by Semiramis, Cyrus, Darius Hys- 
taspes, Alexander the Great, and Seleucus Nicator, consti- 
tute nearly all that we know of its affairs from that source ; 
and these invasions do not seem to have penetrated far into 
the country. From native sources, however, we are now 
enabled to obtain some idea of its internal history; though 
the peculiarly mystical system of the Hindu theology has 
contrived to involve it in a considerable degree of nebu- 
lousness. Certain events, such as the contest between the 
sacerdotal and the warrior castes, signalized by the avatar 



36 THE EAST. 

of Parasu Rama ; the contest between Rama Chandra, the 
hero of the Solar Race, and Ravan of Lanca, apparently 
the champion of the primitive races of southern India ; the 
Mahabharata, or Great War of the Lunar Race ; the propa- 
gation of Buddhism ; its subsequent expulsion ; and the 
glorious reign of Vicramaditya, constitute notable epochs 
in the annals of Hindustan, which are now recognized as 
most important in their bearing on the history of other 
nations. 

Mention has been made of the Solar and Lunar Races of 
Hindustan. These designations are given to different fam- 
ilies of the Hindu Kings, apparently an older and a 
younger line of princes. The princes of the so-called 
Solar Race were the first rulers of the country, deriving 
their descent directly from Menu, the traditional ancestor 
of the nation, probably identical with Noah. The hero of 
the race was Rama, the hero of the Ra may una. 

The younger or Lunar line seem to have borne a rela- 
tion to the Solar Race somewhat similar to that which the 
Hellenes held to the Pelasgi in ancient Greece. The strife 
between the princes of this line, which culminated in the 
Mahabharata, or Great War, was as famous in India as the 
War of Troy was in Greece. 

The contest between the sacerdotal and the warrior 
castes, to which reference has been made, is assigned to a 
period anterior to the year B. C. 1500, the era of Rama 
Chandra and the Ramayuna, to about B. C, 1400; the 
epoch of the Mahabharata to about B C. 1300; the propa- 
gation of Buddhism to about B. C. 1000; and the age of 
Vicramaditya to B. C. 56. 

The modern history of Hindustan may be said to begin 
with the first Mohammedan invasion of the country, in 
A. D. 708, by Mohammed Ibn Kasim, one of the generals 
of the Caliph Al Walid. This was nearly contemporaneous 



APPENDIX. 37 

with the invasion of Spain by two other generals of the 
same Caliph, Musa and Tarik (A. D. 711). But little im- 
pression seems to have been made upon India at this time 
by the Mohammedans. Mahmud of Gazni, Sultan of 
Afghanistan, about A. D. 1000, was the first to effect a 
permanent establishment of Mohammedan power in Hin- 
dustan, which he accomplished by fierce warfare and un- 
relenting persecution of the Brahminical religion. From 
that time to the present century, though the Moham- 
medans number but a small portion of the population, the 
greater part of Hindustan has been under Mohammedan 
sway. The conquest of the country by England has been 
greatly facihtated by the enmity existing between the 
Mohammedans, who are mostly of alien origin, and the 
native Hindus. 

The most important and best known of the Moham- 
medan sovereignties of Hindustan was that denominated 
the Great Mogul Empire, which was established A. D. 
^5255 by Mohammed Baber, a lineal descendant of Tirnur, 
who presents almost the only instance on record of a prince 
driven from his own country (Bokhara), and founding an 
empire in another land. It was called the Mogul or Mon- 
gol Empire, generally with the epithet Great prefixed, on 
account of the MongoKan origin of the family of Timur. 
A succession of able rulers, Baber, Homaiun, Akbar, 
Selim Jehanghir, Shah Jehan, and Aurungzib, raised the 
Great Mogul Empire to power and fame, and extended its 
sway over nearly all Hindustan, notwithstanding that it was 
Mohammedan in religion and alien in race, and that the 
vast majority of its subjects remained devoted adherents of 
the old Brahminical worship. But the sons and successors 
of Aurungzib were weak and incompetent. Ambitious 
chiefs, both Hindu and Mohammedan, set up for them- 
selves in various parts of the country. The Empire fell to 



38 ^ THE EAST. 

pieces. It was the opportunity of England; and she 
availed herself of it. The man for the occasion, Lord 
Clive, was on hand for the purpose. 

One of the best known episodes in the history of the 
Great Mogul Empire, one which has been enshrined in song 
arid romance, is the story of Nurmahal, the '^ Light of the 
Harem" — or, as her lover prefered to call her, Nurjehan, 
the ** Light of the World." She is said to have been of 
Persian origin, and a woman of extraordinary beauty and 
accomplishments. She made her appearance, with her 
father and brother, at the court of the Great Mogul Empe- 
ror Jehanghir (Conqueror of the World), about A. D. 1606 ; 
and the monarch immediately fell in love with her. He 
made her his wife, and it would seem his mistress and sove- 
reign, too ; for she ruled monarch and court with absolute 
sway and much ability, and held the destinies of Hindustan 
in her hands for twenty years, from A. D. 1607 to 1627, 
or nearly the whole reign of Jehanghir. 

The last Oriental invader of India was Ahmed Abdallah, 
chief of Afghanistan. He was one of the principal officers 
in the service of Nadir Shah, the Persian conqueror, who 
had invaded India and plundered Delhi in 1739. On the 
death of Nadir Shah in 1747, Ahmed Abdallah made him- 
self master of the territories of Cabul and Herat, and ulti- 
mately of all Afghanistan ; and founded the dynasties until 
recently existing in that country. The decay of the Great 
Mogul Empire, and the contests of the Mohammedan chiefs 
between themselves, gave occasion to some of the Hindu 
States to reassert themselves; and the Mahrattas, a brave 
and warlike people from the western mountains, rose to im- 
portance, and threatened to become the ruling power in the 
country. Against them, Ahmed Abdallah organized a 
league of the Mohammedan powers ; and he defeated them, 
in A. D. 1 761, in a great battle at Panniput, near Agra, 



APPENDIX. 39 

the old battle field of the Mahabharata. The power of the 
Mahrattas, however, was only checked, not broken ; and 
Hindustan remained divided into many hostile camps, which 
greatly facilitated the ultimate conquest of the country by 
England. 

England was not the first or only European nation that 
contended fi^r power, and wealth, and supremacy in India. 
Portugal, Holland and France, were her formidable rivals 
and competitors. Spain and Portugal, and not England 
and France, were the nations that, at the end of the fif- 
teenth and beginning of the sixteenth century, gave promise 
of the possession of vast colonial empire ; and while the 
New World was abandoned to Spain, Portugal claimed a 
monopoly of East Indian commerce and discovery. Vasco 
de Gama was the first European to sail the Indian Ocean. 
The Cape of Good Hope had already been doubled by 
Bartholemew Diaz in i486. De Gama passed through the 
channel of Mozambique, steered northeastward towards the 
Equator, and made the harbor of Calicut, on the coast 
of Malabar, in 1497. Tlie Portuguese gradually acquired 
territory. Alphonso de Albuquerque, one of the few great 
geniuses of the world, and a man of the highest integrity 
of character, was viceroy of the East Indian possessions of 
Portugal from A. D. 1505 to A. D. 1515. He conquered 
Ormus, with its almost fabulous wealth, the whole coast of 
Malabar, Ceylon, the Sunda Isles, the Peninsula of Malac- 
ca, and numerous other territories ; made favorable alliances 
with the monarchs of Siam, Pegu, and Abyssinia; and 
threatened the conquest of Egypt. Under him, Goa, on 
the coast of Malabar, became the capital of the East Indian 
Empire of Portugal. It now remains the sole remnant of 
that once vast dominion. 

The famous Hispano-Portuguese Jesuit, Francis Xavier, 
arrived at Goa in 1542, and until his death in 1552, 



40 THE EAST. 

preached the Christian rehgion with extraordinary success 
on all the coasts of the Indian seas from Cape Comorin to 
China and Japan. 

Luis de Camoens, the epic poet of Portugal, was in India 
for sixteen years, from 1553 to 1569 ; and it was there that 
he ' composed the Lusiad (Os Lusiados), one of the four 
great epic poems of modern times, in which he commem- 
orates the daring expedition of Vasco de Gama, and no 
doubt drew much of his inspiration from the novel scenes 
of the Eastern seas; though he does not seem to have 
acquired any considerable acquaintance with the literature 
of Hindustan. 

The domestic troubles of Portugal in the sixteenth and 
seventeenth century gave opportunity to her bitter enemies 
and indefatigable rivals, the Hollanders, to break down her 
power in the East, without being able to substitute their 
own in its place, except in Java and a few of the smaller 
Malaysian islands. 

About A. D. 1672, France undertook the estabhshment 
of colonial trade and power in the East by the purchase of 
Pondicherry, on the eastern coast of the Deccan. This was 
four years before the establishment of the English at Cal- 
cuttai Louis XIV. was then monarch of France, and 
Aurungzib, the great Mogul Emperor of India — rulers not 
very unlike in their history and their personal characteristic^. 
During the War of the Austrian Succession in Europe 
(i 740-1 745), and up to the time of the breaking out of the 
Seven Years' War between England and France (i 756-1 763), 
in which our American Colonies took so memorable a part, 
Joseph Dupleix was governor of the French possessions in 
the East Indies — a man of extraordinary ability, and the 
contemporary and worthy compeer of the great Marquis de 
Montcalm. The designs of the latter in America found 
their counterpart in the gigantic plans of Dupleix to build 



APPENDIX. 41 

u^ a great colonial empire for France in India. But the 
inefficiency of the French home government was equally 
fatal to both ; and as the hopes of France in America went 
down forever on the plains of Abraham before the intrepidity 
of General Wolfe, the schemes of Dupleix failed before the 
genius of Lord Clive and the rising star of England. Pon- 
dicherry, her first possession, remains her last, like Goa to 
Portugal, and the sole remnant of a once mighty empire. 

For many ages Benares has been the Holy City of the 
Hindus. It became doubly dear to them when their an- 
cient capital, Indraprestha, now Delhi, passed into the hands 
of the Mohammedans. Benares suffered much in the 
numerous Mohammedan invasions of Hindustan ; yet it re- 
retains considerable traces of its ancient glory and mag- 
nificence. Many of its temples and public buildings were 
projected on a grand scale ; and the influence of its archi- 
tecture on that of the Arabs, as subsequently introduced 
into southern Europe under the name of Saracenic, is quite 
apparent, 

Elephanta and Ellora constitute the Pantheon or Valhalla 
of Hindustan. Elephanta, so called from its resemblance 
at a distance to the profile of an elephant, is a small island 
near Bombay, remarkable for its wonderful cave -temples, 
hewn from the solid rock, and adorned with statues of the 
Hindu gods cut in the same way. Ellora is a small town in 
the Deccan or Southern India, where there are several simi- 
lar cave-temples and statues in them carved from the solid 
rock. 

Mention has been made of Golconda, in the Deccan. It 
was for a long time a rich and powerful kingdom, among 
the rulers of which are enumerated several queens. It was 
once the great diamond field of the world, and has not yet 
entirely lost its reputation in that respect. From it the 
famous Kohinur (Mountain of Light), and most of the 
noted diamonds of Europe, were originally brought. 



42 THE EAST. 

The history of the Kohinur is somewhat remarkable. It 
and another stone of equal size and brilliancy are said to 
have once served as eyes for an idol of Vishnu in one 
of the temples of the Deccan. One of the briUiants, it is 
stated, was stolen by a soldier, and was never recovered. 
The other, the Kohinur, passed into the possession of the 
Mogul Emperors Shah Jehan (162 7-1666) and Aurun- 
gizib (1666-1707). In 1739, the Persian Conqueror 
Nadir Shah seized it, with other treasures, at the capture 
and sack of Delhi, and gave it the name it now bears. By 
some it is said that Nadir Shah plucked the diamond from 
the idol of Vishnu. Others attribute this act to the 
Emperor Shah Jehan, or to some earlier prince. Accounts 
equally differ as to the time when the stone was first taken 
from the earth. Some say it was found before the Chris- 
tian era; others place its discovery as late as A. D. 1550. 
Its later history is better known. 

At the death of Nadir Shah in 1747, in the confusion 
consequent thereon, Ahmed Abdallah, the Afghan, one of 
his generals, of whom mention has already been made, 
plundered his palace, seized the Kohinur, and retired into 
Afghanistan. Abdallah's grandson, Shah Sujah, gave the 
diamond to Runjeet Smgh, chief of the Punjaub, as the 
price of the assistance of the latter to enable him . to 
recover the throne of Cabul, from which he had been ex- 
pelled. This was about A. D. 1808. Runjeet transmitted 
it, upon his death in 1839, to his son and successor Dhulip 
Singh ; from whom, on the conquest of the Punjaub by the 
English in 1849, i^ passed to the crown of Great Britain. 
The Hindus believe that the possession of the Kohinur 
brings disaster in its train — a belief which is not altogether 
unwarranted by the history of its several successive owners. 

Note 6. The Asiatic Society was established in 1784, 



APPENDIX. 43 

with Sir William Jones, its chief promoter, as the first 
president. Most of Sir William's valuable papers on 
Oriental subjects were read before it. Twenty volumes of 
the ''^Asiatic Researches," which contain the transactions 
of the Society from 1784 to 1836, testify to the greatness 
of the work accomplished by it, besides numerous publica- 
tions that were made under its auspices. The ''Asiatic Re- 
searches" were followed by the "Journal of the Asiatic 
Society." > 

Note 7. The antiquity of the Vedas and Puranas, of the 
Ramayuna and Mahabharata, and the events celebrated in 
those poems, and of the literary and philosophical develop- 
ment generally of the Hindus, has been a subject of some 
controversy. By Sir William Jones, the composition of 
the Vedas is assigned to the sixteenth century before Christ, 
which would make them nearly contemporaneous with the 
age of Moses. Mr. Henry T. Colebrooke, a distinguished 
East Indian scholar, and the worthy successor of Sir Wil- 
liam Jones in the Asiatic Society, and on the bench of the 
high court of judicature of Bengal, assigns them to the 
fourteenth century before our era. The Ramayuna is sup- 
posed to have been written about B. C. 1400; the Mahab- 
harata about B. C. 1300. The promulgation of the laws of 
Menu, a most remarkable system of legislation, Sir William 
Jones places about the year B. C. 800, the era of Lycurgus 
in Greece. Schlegel regards it as of much earlier date. 
Colebrooke contends for the very high antiquity of the 
Hindu philosophy; while Ritter, in his History of Ancient 
Philosophy, attributes to it a much more modern origin. 
The probability seems to be that, though these several pro- 
ductions of Hindu genius may have been revised in com- 
paratively recent times, as the Homeric poems were revised 
and re-edited by Pisistratus, they are substantially entitled 



44 THE EAST. 

to the high antiquity claimed for them ; and the progress of 
investigation justifies this conclusion. 

It may be stated that the arrangement of the Vedas in 
their present shape is usually attributed to Vyasa, the author 
of the Mahabharata; though there is reason to suppose that 
the ' name Vyasa is a generic one, like Caesar or Ptolemy, 
and not necessarily that of an individual. 

Note 8. The war of the Mahabharata was an epoch in the 
history of Hindustan as notable as that of the Trojan war 
with the Greeks, and equally remarkable in its influence 
upon the Hterature and intellectual development of subse- 
quent ages. The writer of the Mahabharata writes as an 
eye-witness of the events which he relates, and those events 
can scarcely be more recent than the year B. C. 1300. 

The story, in brief, is this : Pandu, the son of Vichi- 
travirya, monarch of Hindustan, had been excluded from 
the succession to the throne on some suspicion of illegiti- 
macy, and his younger brother, Dhertarasbtra, was pro- 
moted in his stead. In course of time, the five sons of 
Pandu, known as the Pandava brothers, and whose names 
were Yudisthira, Arjuna, Baldeva, Bhima and Sudeva, 
asserted the right of their chief Yudisthira to the imperial 
throne. They had estabhshed themselves at Indaprestha ; 
while Duryodan and his hundred brothers, of the younger 
line of Dhertarasbtra, who had taken the name of Kurus 
from one of their ancestors, made Hastinapur their seat of 
government. All the princes of India took part on one 
side or the other. Chief among the allies of the Pandavas, 
was Chrishna of Guzzerat, the bosom friend of Arjuna, and 
who proved to be an avatar of Vishnu. The strife culmi- 
nated, as stated, in the great battle at Panniput, on the 
plains of Agra, in which, with the aid of Chrishna, the 
Pandavas triumphed. Duryodan, of Hastinapur, and all his 



APPENDIX. 



45 



brethren, were slain. Grieved at the dreadful slaughter, the 
Pandavas, it is said, retired from India; and their after 
fate remains untold. Chrishna was accidentally killed some 
years afterwards in a thicket by a hunter ; and his sons were 
driven out of India. 

Woman plays no such important part in the Mahabharata, 
as she does in the Ramayuna. Yet much of the beauty of 
Vyasa's great poem is due to the intervention of his 
heroines, Rhadha, the favorite mistress of Chrishna, and 
Drupdevi, the queen of the Pandava brothers. Drupdevi 
was the wife at once of all the five brothers, an instance of 
polyandria not unusual among the professors of Buddhism, 
but the first to be found in the annals of Hindustan. 

Such is the simple groundwork of the story of the Maha- 
bharata, which seems to have been founded upon actual 
occurrences. But how far the numerous episodes of the 
poem, the exploits of Chrishna and Arjuna, and the great 
catastrophe, are historical, it is difficult to say. Tliere are 
evidences of an element of religious controversy in the 
struggle ; and one of the most remarkable portions of the 
poem is a discourse of Chrishna with Arjuna, before the 
great battle, full of the profoundest religious and philos- 
ophical speculations. 

The Pandavas, it is said, after their withdrawal from the 
country, disappeared from history. But it is somewhat 
startling to find them reappear, on the theory of Tod, 
Pococke and Wilford, as the Heracleidse of Greece and 
Western Asia ; and it must be confessed that the theory 
does not seem to be without some foundation. Examined 
in the light of it, the events of immediately succeeding 
centuries in the Assyro-Babylonian Empire, Asia Minor, 
and Greece, evince a connection at this time between 
Eastern and Western Asia, that can no longer be ignored 
in the investigation of their respective antiquities. 



46 THE EAST. 

Note p. There seems to be good reason to believe, that 
Hindustan exercised much greater influence than is com- 
monly supposed on Europe and Western Asia, in the earlier 
ages of the world. The "Annals of Rajahstan " by Col. 
James Tod, of the British Army (London, 1829, 1861), 
and Pococke's ''India in Greece" (London, 1852), con- 
tain some curious and interesting reflexions on this point, 
which commend themselves quite forcibly to all classical 
scholars. Burnouf's '■'■ Introduction a /' Histoire du Bud- 
dhisme Indien^' (Paris, 1844), and Lacroix-Marles' ^^ His- 
toire de r Inde ancienne et moderne (Paris, 1828), suggest 
similar reflections. Sir WiUiam Jones himself was struck 
with the similarities existing between the mythology of In- 
dia and that of Greece and Italy, which he illustrated in 
a special paper on the subject, to be found among his 
works. His successors in the Asiatic Society have developed 
much in the same line of thought. 

Note 10. The Sacontala of Calidasa was translated into 
English by Sir William Jones ; and the translation is to be 
found in his published works. A translation of it, and of 
several other Hindu dramas, is to be found in the " Theatre 
of the Hindus," by Henry Hayman Wilson, who has also 
published translations of the Puranas, and of parts of the 
Ramayuna and Mahabharata. Parts of these two poems 
were also translated by Sir WiUiam Jones, as was likewise 
the Gitagoninda of Jayadeva. 

Note II. Tyndall, in his famous address at Belfast, is 
candid enough to admit that the philosophy of evolution is 
not new ; that it is the legitimate outgrowth of the atomic 
theory in physics ; and that it was taught by several of the 
ancient philosophers. He falls into an error, however, no 
doubt unconsciously, in attributing the promulgation of 



APPENDIX, , 47 

the atomic theory to Zeno of Elea, instead of Democritus 
of Abdera. The philosophy of Zeno was quite the reverse 
of evolution : it was a development of Pythagorean panthe- 
ism in the direction of idealism ; while the tendency of 
the philosophy of evolution is unquestionably materialistic. 
Democritus of Abdera is entitled to be regarded as the 
father of the doctrine of evolution. And yet he undoubt- 
edly derived his ideas from the East. 

It is a noticeable fact, that those Greek philosophers 
who are known to have traveled in Asia, as Pythagoras, 
Democritus of Abdera, and Plato, are those whose philo- 
sophical tenets most nearly resemble those of the Hindus — 
a strong argument, by the way, for the priority and an- 
tiquity of the Hindu philosophy. 

Note 12. Serving as an introduction to the Gitagovinda 
of Jayadeva, of which mention has been made, is to be 
found an enumeration by the poet of the ten great avatars 
of Vishnu, which the curious in such matters may be grati- 
fied to find here transcribed. The appellations Heri and 
Kesava, which frequently recur in it, are names of Vishnu, 
of which the former is supposed to mean Lord, and to be 
derived from the same root as Aria ; and the latter signi- 
fies Conqueror of Kesi (one of the bitter enemies of 
Chrishna). The translation is by Sir William Jones. 



ODE TO VISHNU. 



I, Thou recoverest the Veda in the water of the ocean of 
destruction, placing it joyfully in the bosom of an ark fab- 
ricated by thee, O Ke^sava, assuming the body of a fish. 
Be victorious, O Heri, lord of the Universe ! 



48 THE EAST. 

2. The earth, placed on the point of thy tusk, remains 
fixed Hke the figure of a black antelope on the moon, O 
Ke^sava, assuming the form of a boar. Be victorious, O 
Heri, lord of the Universe ! 

3. The earth stands firm on thy immensely broad back, 
which grows larger from the callus occasioned by bearing 
that vast burden, OKe'sava, assuming the body of a tor- 
toise. Be victorious, O Heri, lord of the Universe ! 

4. The claw with a stupendous point on the exquisite 
lotos of thy lion's paw, is the black bee that stung the body 
of the embowelled Hiranyacasipu, O Ke^sava, assuming the 
form of a man -lion. Be victorious, O Heri, lord of the 
Universe ! 

5. By thy power thou beguilest Bali, O thou miraculous 
dwarf, thou purifier of men with the water (of Ganga) 
springing from thy feet, O Ke'sava, assuming the form of a 
dwarf. Be victorious, O Heri, lord of the Universe ! 

6. Thou bathest in pure water, consisting of the blood 
of Cshatriyas, the world, whose offenses are removed, and 
which is relieved of the pain of other births, O Ke'sava, 
assuming the form of Parasu Rama. Be victorious, O 
Heri, lord of the Universe ! 

7. With ease to thyself, with delight to the genii of the 
eight regions, thou scatterest on all sides, in the plain of 
combat, the demon with ten heads, O Ke'sava, assuming the 
form of Rama Chandra. Be victorius, O Heri, lord of the 
Universe ! 

8. Thou wearest on thy bright body a mantle shining 
like a blue cloud, or like the water of Yamuna tripping 
toward thee through fear of thy furrowing ploughshare, O 
Ke'sava, assuming the form of Chrishna. Be victorious, O 
Heri, lord of the Universe ! 

9. Thou blamest (oh, wonderful power) ! the whole 
Veda, whe.n thou seest, oh kind-hearted, the slaughter of 



APPENDIX. 49 

cattle prescribed for sacrifice, O Ke'sava, assuniing the body 
of Buddha. Be victorious, O Heri, lord of the Universe ! 
lo. For the destruction of all the impious, thou drawest 
thy cimiter^ blazing like a comet (how tremendous !), O 
Ke'sava, assuming the body of Calci. Be victorius, O Heri, 
lord of the Universe ! 

As already stated, the first three avatars probably have 
reference to the Noachian Deluge. The first, the Matsya 
(or fish) avatar, represents Vishnu, in the form of a fish, 
preserving a a virtuous family during the incursion of a 
great deluge, and recovering the sacred books lost during 
its continuance. 

In the second, or Vara (Boar) avatar, Vishnu is repre- 
sented in human form, with a boar's head, supporting on 
his tusks the earth, which he has rescued from the abyss of 
water, in which it had been submerged by a demon, and 
trampling the demon under his feet. 

In the third or Courma (Tortoise) avatar, Vishnu, in the 
form of a tortoise, the Hindu symbol of strength, supports 
on his back the earth that is about to sink in the waters, 
and which has heen convulsed by the assaults of demons. 

In the fourth, or Nara-Singh (Man-Lion ) avatar, Vishnu 
appears as a man with a hon's head, to overthrow and tear 
to pieces the tyrant Hiranyacasipu (supposed to be Nim- 
rod). The god is represented as breaking forth on the 
tyrant from a shattered pillar, an idea suggestive of the 
tower of Babel and the dispersion of mankind from the 
plains of Shinar, as related in Genesis. 

The fifth, or Dwarf avatar, was intended to confound 
another tyrant, Bali (or Belus), king of Mahabalipur (Great 
Babylon). 

The sixth avatar is supposed to have reference to some 
early contest between the Kshatriyas or warrior class, and 



50 THE EAST. 

the sacerdotal caste for supremacy ; in which the latter, 
under the lead of Parasu Rama, himself apparently a Ksha- 
triya, but in reality an incarnation of Vishnu, ultimately 
triumphed, with great slaughter of their opponents. This 
was probably one of the earliest contests in the history of 
Hindustan. 

The ''Demon with ten heads," conquered by Rama 
Chandra (Moon Rama), the hero of the Ramayuna, was 
Ravan of Lanca. The enemies of Hindustan, it will be 
noticed, are always represented as demons or incarnations 
of the evil principle ; while its heroes are avatars of Vishnu. 
The number of heads is merely indicative of power. 

The favorite avatar of the Hindus is the eighth, in which 
Vishnu became incarnate as Chrishna, the hero of the 
Mahabharata, and the Apollo and Achilles of Hindustan. 
Chrishna is usually represented as clad in blue robes. His 
favorite color is blue ; his favorite flower is the blue lotos or 
water-lily. His favorite haunts were the meadows of Agra 
and the banks of the blue Yamuna or Jumna, which he is 
said to have once compelled to come out of its channel to" 
him by a threat to run his ploughshare into its stream. 

A prominent characteristic of Buddhism, as first promul- 
gated, was its opposition to the practice of animal sacrifice, 
which had been sanctioned by the Vedas ; and hence, in 
the ninth avatar, Vishnu condemns that which he had 
before authorized. 

Calci is the name given to the white horse of the tenth 
avatar, which is yet to come. 



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